


Kol Nidrei

by Philosopher_King



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Jewish Good Omens (Good Omens), Jewish Holidays, M/M, Musical References, Yom Kippur | Atonement Day
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-26
Updated: 2019-10-26
Packaged: 2021-01-13 17:14:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,964
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21184886
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Philosopher_King/pseuds/Philosopher_King
Summary: After the world doesn't end, Aziraphale attends Erev Yom Kippur services and recites the Kol Nidrei, as he does every year... but in the coming year he will no longer be tempted to make the usual vain oaths he needs to renounce -- especially his most frequent oath, that he will stop seeking out, thinking about, or having un-hereditary-enemy-like feelings for Crowley.





	Kol Nidrei

Aziraphale liked going to houses of worship because it made him feel closer to God. He realized that this must seem foolish or paradoxical: he was, after all, a being suffused with God’s love and grace; and if he went through the right procedures, he could even (in theory) make direct contact with the Almighty. But calls to the Court of God’s Power through such channels—it had recently been made brutally, devastatingly clear to him—in fact went through a spokes-angel (no, not the wheeled kind), a mere mouthpiece who _claimed _to listen and speak on behalf of God. Speaking to God as an angel, using the capabilities and privileges his angelic nature afforded him, he had only ever reached a Glorified secretary.

Humans, though, when they prayed—it was possible that God truly listened. Angels listened, too, and sometimes took it upon themselves to answer; God was not in principle opposed to delegating, and angels were permitted a certain amount of latitude in how they executed the Divine Will, broadly understood. But sometimes miracles occurred, or moments of mystical inspiration, or improbable causal nudges, that could not be accounted for, even with all the Heavenly Bureaucracy’s scrupulous record-keeping. Then the angels had to wonder whether God Herself had heard and answered a prayer that Her agents had passed over. One of the Archangels would make a note by the observation of the anomalous event: _“Divine intervention?” _Always with a question mark, for God’s ways were known to none but God.

Aziraphale felt closer to God among humans praying than in the blessed Light of Heaven, or in his own grace-filled solitude, because he knew that their voices actually had a chance of being heard. Especially when they prayed in community, because although God did sometimes attend to solitary prayers (which might pierce through the noise because of the devoutness or holiness or strong personality of the pray-er), a group of people all speaking or meditating on the same message reinforce each other in a way that is not simply a matter of additive volume, but of resonance.

Because Aziraphale was at heart (and in body) an aesthete, he preferred places and modes of worship with a certain amount of pomp and ceremony. He could not abide the slick commercial atmosphere of ‘evangelical’ megachurches or the adaptation of modern popular musical styles to the purpose of worship; the mere presence of a guitar would send him out the door as quickly as consecrated ground did most demons. Nor was he much attracted to the simplest of gatherings, the mostly silent Quaker Circles, the unadorned meeting-houses that remained true to the Calvinist tradition (and, arguably, the original tradition of Christ and the first Apostles). No, he preferred the lushness of Catholic and Orthodox churches, their sparkling mosaics and glowing stained-glass masterpieces, the Masses and Liturgies composed by Europe’s greatest creative geniuses for sumptuous choirs and virtuosos playing thundering organs (Aziraphale found that of all artists, he had an especial rapport with organists[1]). And if sometimes such fare was too rich even for him, he felt comfortably at home in the stolid, dignified (or as Crowley would say, stuffy and pompous) tradition of the Church of England. The Elgar and Britten anthems were not quite your Bach Mass or Verdi Requiem; but not even Aziraphale could eat lobster and venison every day.

So when the Jewish High Holidays came round and one felt compelled to put in an appearance (‘one’ referring not only to Heaven’s representatives on Earth, but to the Jewish worshipers as well), Aziraphale tended toward a certain style of Reform-to-Conservative congregation that favoured tastefully ornate architecture and a choir, accompanied by a piano or (in rare cases) an organ, singing nineteenth-century settings of the prayers and psalms much in the style of Mendelssohn,[2] or perhaps mid-twentieth-century arrangements taking inspiration from some combination of Rachmaninoff, Vaughan Williams, and dramatic film scores. Aziraphale was especially attached to the melancholy cello solo playing Bruch’s setting of the _Kol Nidrei _melody with which such congregations habitually began the Yom Kippur evening service.

On a mild, damp early autumn evening forty days after the world failed to end, Aziraphale went alone to the synagogue whose Kol Nidrei services he had been attending for the past twenty years or so (he was a creature of habit as much as, if not more than, a creature of love). He closed his eyes and let the cello’s plaintive voice set his chest to sweetly aching and was desperately grateful that he still had this—this salmon and crème fraîche omelette instead of the ‘eggs without salt’ of eternal celestial harmonies (_stop thinking in food metaphors on a fast day!_, he scolded himself, hurriedly directing his thoughts away from his stomach).

The cello’s final tremulous notes faded away and the cantor (who had classical operatic training; there was a reason Aziraphale preferred the services here) began singing the words of the Kol Nidrei. Aziraphale’s French or his Tibetan might sometimes grow rusty, but Hebrew and Aramaic always came back to him like riding a velocipede (or so they said; not that he would know).

_“All vows,” _the cantor sang (joined at musically appropriate points by the choir), _“self-prohibitions, consecrations, bonds, promises, obligations, and oaths that we have vowed, sworn, consecrated, and taken as prohibitions upon ourselves from this Yom Kippur until the next—may it come to us for good—we regret and renounce them all; may they all be absolved, forgiven, cancelled, and rendered null and void; they shall have no force, and shall not endure. Let our vows not be vows, our prohibitions not be prohibitions, our oaths not be oaths.”_

There was a widespread belief that the custom of making this declaration originated among the Iberian Jews who were forced to publicly convert to Christianity but who continued to practice their Judaism in secret—who insincerely forswore their faith in the sight of God and men, but wished to retract these false oaths in God’s sight alone. Among those who knew the text was older, the story was that it came out of an earlier time of persecution and conversions on pain of death. Aziraphale (who had witnessed the whole painful, arduous, improbable history of this people) knew that it came out of nothing of the sort: it was just that the Jews had an unfortunate habit, which caused their priests and rabbis no end of intestinal distress, of making solemn vows at the drop of a hat. There was even a significant commandment not to make vain oaths in the name of the Lord, but the habit persisted. So a formal ritual of renunciation was introduced in the hope that God could be persuaded not to take such utterances so terribly seriously. But it took on a darker, weightier significance in the face of the forced conversions that became a recurring theme in the history of the Jews. God’s Providence works in unexpected ways: a tradition that arose for one purpose might later prove even more essential for another.

When Aziraphale recited the formula with this congregation, it was always for the original reason for which it had been instituted. He, like the early Hebrews, had a shameful habit of making promises to God that he should have known he wouldn’t be able to keep. He promised he wouldn’t use frivolous miracles; he promised he wouldn’t eat and drink so lavishly; he promised he would be paying more attention next time, so that maybe he could stop or at least mitigate the next horror that the humans visited upon themselves—unless, of course, Michael or Gabriel told him it was part of the Divine Plan, in which case he would smile uncomfortably and wonder whether he should be praying that they were right or that they were wrong.

Above all, he promised to set aside his feelings for Crowley. He didn’t promise not to see him anymore—he had to keep an eye on Hell’s agent in his sector of the Earth, didn’t he?—but after every time they met, when he departed with a hollowness in his stomach that could not be filled by any amount of oysters or brioche, he promised that he would give no thought to the demon except in regard to thwarting him. He promised he would tell Crowley the Arrangement was over (of course, he never did… not until the second-to-last day of the world, when Crowley threatened to make him face up to what Heaven really was, and what _they_ really were). He promised he would stay away, except to watch his counterpart’s movements, and perhaps to confront him directly if there was no other way of stopping his machinations. And he kept that promise for a whole century between 1862 and 1967—their encounter in 1941 had been entirely on Crowley’s initiative!—but during that century of separation, and especially after its unplanned interruption, he had been even more abysmal at keeping his promise not to think of Crowley in anything but his professional capacity.

Now Aziraphale was facing the first full year since the world had not been made anew, but somehow _his _world had; and he realized that he no longer needed to ask pre-emptive absolution for his usual vain promises to God. No one would be keeping track of Aziraphale’s “frivolous miracles,” much less sending him nasty letters about them. And though Aziraphale himself would never say it, he quite agreed with Crowley that Gabriel could shove his self-righteous comments about Aziraphale’s “gut” right up his tightly-clenched arse, along with that appalling tracksuit (he wasn’t entirely sure what Crowley had meant by calling him “basic,” but he gathered that it wasn’t good). Crowley liked him soft (he made a very good body-pillow, he was told), so Aziraphale liked himself that way, too.

As to preventing the horrors of human history… he wasn’t sure that he had any right to interfere, except by showing and encouraging kindness, where he could. As a Heavenly agent on Earth, he was retired, but he would remain a being of love until… well, until Heaven succeeded in destroying him, or God decided he deserved to Fall. But even then, he wasn’t sure: Crowley had Fallen (or “sauntered vaguely downwards,” as he liked to insist), but Aziraphale suspected that he was still a being of love, in spite of everything.

Most importantly, the primary impetus for Aziraphale’s empty vows, self-prohibitions, promises, and oaths no longer obtained. From this year on, there would be no vows not to think of Crowley, work with him, seek out his company. _“For centuries I regretted and renounced those vows because I feared I couldn’t keep them,” _Aziraphale said silently to God; he wasn’t sure whether or not he hoped She was actually listening. _“Now I regret and renounce them because I should never have made them in the first place. I should never have wanted to be able to keep them.”_

_“Let our oaths not be oaths,” _the choir was singing as the elaborate Romantic-style arrangement drew toward its dramatic close, the cantor’s voice rising in an impressive final cadenza. _“Let our oaths not be oaths.”_

_“Ush’vuatana la sh’vuot,” _Aziraphale whispered in time with the singers. All his foolish oaths had already been annulled,[3] most of them before he even made them; he could not now go back and retract them for the right reason. Well, he would probably come up with some new vain oaths, maybe about being less of a bastard to unwitting would-be customers in his bookshop.

There were some other vows he had it in mind to make where Crowley was concerned, but those would not be made only to God, and he had every intention of keeping them.

**Author's Note:**

> 1 Most organists (as you may have noticed if you spend much time singing in church choirs) are gay.  [ return to text ]
> 
> 2 “It sounds like bloody Gilbert and Sullivan,” Crowley had muttered to Aziraphale once when he had been invited to accompany him for a lark (the ground of synagogues did not burn his feet), and Aziraphale had had to bite the inside of his cheek to maintain his disapproving expression and stifle a laugh. “Listen, it’s the chorus of sisters, cousins, and aunts.”  [ return to text ]
> 
> 3 With the exception of those made during a year late in the eleventh century just before the change of tense instituted by Rabbi Meïr ben Shmuel, applying the renunciation to the year ahead rather than the year just past, reached the synagogue in Paris where Aziraphale had been spending the Days of Awe for several years. Aziraphale panicked about it for a good six months, and indeed whenever he thought about it (with diminishing frequency) thereafter, not least because he and Crowley had first embarked on the Arrangement earlier that century and Aziraphale spent decades regularly resolving to back out and never following through.  [ return to text ]


End file.
